An abstract is a brief passage that summarizes the important points of a text. Conventionally, abstracts are manually produced from an article, book, or document. A person, perhaps even the writer, reads through the document to attain an understanding of the contents. With that understanding, the person composes an abstract that summarizes the document. This process is often very time-consuming.
In addition, manually producing an abstract can be quite expensive. A person writing an abstract for a technical document must be able to understand the contents, which requires advanced education. Thus, sufficiently educated people are in much demand and often highly paid.
An increasing number of documents are now being converted into computer readable form and stored in computer databases and file systems. As these computer databases include more and more documents, they are becoming increasingly more difficult to manage and use. No single individual can read and be familiar with the nature and contents of every document in one of these databases. Browsing these databases for a relevant document can be quite time-consuming.
Some document management systems provide a keyword search facility, allowing a user to search for documents containing particular words or phrases. However, with very large document databases, it is not uncommon for the search engine of the document management system to return hundreds of documents matching the search criteria. Thus, even with a search facility, users still have to browse for relevant documents.
Accordingly, it is desirable to maintain abstracts for each document to reduce browsing times. However, given the large number of documents it is cost prohibitive to manually produce abstracts for each document in a document database. Therefore, there is a need for producing abstracts without much manual intervention.